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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22537144">in these dreams (it's always you)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/hegelsholiday/pseuds/hegelsholiday'>hegelsholiday</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hierarchy [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>INFINITE (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Organized Crime AU, a 5+1 if you squint, jang dongwoo deserves the world, kim "emotions are a hoax for losers" sunggyu, questionable realism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:21:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,738</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22537144</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/hegelsholiday/pseuds/hegelsholiday</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>in between the ins and outs of intermediate safehouses sunggyu slipped square coupons into the pockets of dongwoo’s unworn jeans and quietly paid off sungjong’s law school fees. he laughed at howon’s unhidden barbs and fired back his own, noted myungsoo’s quiet corner-scribblings and paid backhanded compliments for woohyun’s way with convenience store bought tea leaves. he and sungyeol never quite got along, but they’d reached a wary sort of understanding early on. they were a rude bunch, slung insults much better than they could just about anything else, and sunggyu fit in easily with the sharpness of his own tongue. </p><p>dongwoo admired him for it, if admiration was the appropriate word for it, the way he watched sunggyu’s fingers slide down the safety of a revolver. woohyun used to joke that it was the danger of it all, threw nauseous winks and worried frowns at him behind sunggyu’s back that made dongwoo feel sick with something that felt quite a lot like guilt.</p><p> </p><p>(dongwoo woke up one november morning and sunggyu was still there in his head, littered across the insides of his skull in a trail of cold, damning evidence.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jang Dongwoo/Kim Sunggyu</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>hierarchy [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781374</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>in these dreams (it's always you)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>1.<br/>
“you eat too fast. it seems like you’re starving all the time.” </p><p>there was no malice in sunggyu’s tone, and dongwoo had learned not to look for it. to feel defensive. </p><p>“maybe hyung-nim just hasn’t starved enough to know,” he said, and sunggyu laughed. (sunggyu laughed like summer monsoons, thunderstorm-erratic, but more than that, like the smell of rain that lingered afterwards.) </p><p>“alright, alright.” dongwoo pouted at him. there was an air with which sunggyu carried himself that radiated trustworthiness, a kind of ease of movement that dongwoo sucked in greedily. “i won't say anything. you can stop doing that--thing.” sunggyu scrunched his face half-heartedly in a poor imitation of his own pout. </p><p>“don’t you like it?” </p><p>“it looks ugly.” </p><p>at dongwoo’s mock upset face, sunggyu laughed shortly, jabbing his chopsticks at him. “alright, you look like a supermodel. happy, now?” </p><p>“hyung-nim doesn’t mean it.” </p><p>“of course not,” sunggyu scoffed. “i don’t pay you to be pretty.” </p><p>“well, obviously hyung-nim doesn’t need to pay other people to be pretty,” dongwoo said. as soon as it left his mouth, he remembered who and where this was. “ah--i’m--” </p><p>sunggyu waved him off. “flattery won’t get you anywhere here,” he said, and dongwoo registered that he was still smiling. he breathed a little easier. </p><p>“i wouldn’t expect it to.”</p><p> </p><p>(it would be disingenuous to say that dongwoo got into the business through someone else--unwittingly, unwillingly. a victim of circumstance. or rather, it seemed disingenuous to label him a victim at all, when all things considered getting involved had been so, laughably simple. </p><p>a few years ago a friend he knew only peripherally approached him and said <i>hey, you still interested in earning money from undisclosed sources</i>, and dongwoo, mired in the middle of medical school bills had said yes without hesitation. </p><p>he put him in contact with some name or another, someone who paid for information and rumors and those who were good at digging them up, and dongwoo met sunggyu for the second time like that, on the receiving end of assignments and checks and illegally obtained materials. </p><p>the scariest thing about dabbling around on the edges of seoul’s underworld was not the prominence of the danger, nor the thickness of the sense of corruption, injustice, but merely how simple it seemed to be, how easily it came to dongwoo. people trusted easily, didn’t seem to realize how precious a commodity it could be. they gave it out freely, with their unguarded gestures, their clear eyes, and it occurred to dongwoo many times that he could and would have been just the same as them. </p><p>in between the ins and outs of intermediate safehouses sunggyu slipped square coupons into the pockets of dongwoo’s unworn jeans and quietly paid off sungjong’s law school fees. he laughed at howon’s unhidden barbs and fired back his own, noted myungsoo’s quiet corner-scribblings and paid backhanded compliments for woohyun’s way with convenience store bought tea leaves. he and sungyeol never quite got along, but they’d reached a wary sort of understanding early on. they were a rude bunch, slung insults much better than they could just about anything else, and sunggyu fit in easily with the sharpness of his own tongue. </p><p>dongwoo admired him for it, if admiration was the appropriate word for it, the way he watched sunggyu’s fingers slide down the safety of a revolver. woohyun used to joke that it was the danger of it all, threw nauseous winks and worried frowns at him behind sunggyu’s back that made dongwoo feel sick with something that felt quite a lot like guilt.</p><p>sunggyu built empires on glass lights and cigarette smoke, and dongwoo stood behind him and watched in silence.) </p><p> </p><p>2.<br/>
beijing smelled like sunggyu, but only in the sense that the cigarette smoke stench that always clung lightly to the other was amplified to a million by the loudness of the city. it was long past two in the morning and even he was beginning to stumble on his feet, but there didn’t seem to be a part of beijing that wasn’t alive. </p><p>“how good is your mandarin?” sunggyu asked mildly, conversationally, as they waited for their contact to arrive at the airport. as if dongwoo hadn’t been specifically chosen because of his language skills (and his loyalty, or perhaps, if he was feeling less generous, his naivete.) </p><p>“good enough,” he said. “i did well in school on it.” </p><p>“hm,” said sunggyu. “i never cared much for the subject myself. slept through as many lectures as i could manage.” </p><p>it occurred to dongwoo then that sunggyu as a student must’ve been the gifted type, the type that invested in the areas he knew he was already good at and didn’t bother with learning the rest that would require any effort on his part to achieve. dongwoo had never been good enough at one subject in school to say the same. he had cast his net wide and studied as hard as he could, and though his parents hadn’t been too pleased with what he had caught, even he had gone somewhere eventually. </p><p>so instead he nodded and smiled, and started on an innocent tangent about the length of the girl in the front seat’s hair. even now, dongwoo could remember how long and thick it had grown, before she’d come to school early the next day half in tears over its newly bobbed style. </p><p>(in the underworld, dongwoo had soon learned that those who didn’t have enough power to be feared had to get by with making themselves look smaller. weaker. stupider. you could talk and talk and make yourself seem like a completely different person than you felt like afterwards, and that was okay.) </p><p>“you talk too much,” sunggyu said, after a while. “you don’t need to do that around me.” </p><p>even in moments in between silence, sunggyu remained a strict taskmaster. <i>you talk too fast. laugh too much.</i> </p><p>talking was a protection. like playing dead. even with sunggyu (especially with sunggyu), dongwoo clutched it close to his chest and looked his opponents in the eye. “is hyung-nim bothered by it?” </p><p>“no. and don’t call me hyung-nim. not here. the others have long since stopped doing it anyway.” </p><p>beijing was loud but dongwoo knew from experience that whispers were still heard, so he did not deign to give the unasked question an answer. he let sunggyu flag down their contact in a brightly painted yellow cab and stewed in it, let sunggyu’s hand brush across his wrist opening their hotel room door and tried not to think anything of it. </p><p>dongwoo stayed silent in between whispered translations and points of contact, watched the fingers of black suit shadows curl around slender tea cups, move over flowers of blue smoke. he took in the nervous tells, the erratic tapping of sunggyu’s fingernails against tabletops, the faces flushed red in anger. </p><p>afterwards he whispered these in sunggyu’s ears, in the privacy of their hotel room, watched his eyebrows raise and his mouth thin. (sunggyu was just as easy to read as the rest of them sometimes--sometimes all it took was for dongwoo to <i>look</i> and the things he needed were there.) </p><p><i>i did not teach you that</i>, sunggyu’s eyes said, and dongwoo smiled and shoved his hands back into his pockets. </p><p>(when you became invisible--for when you were stupid you were invisible--people let things slip. dongwoo caught them with outstretched hands every time, those little fragments.) </p><p>“do you trust me, hyung-nim?” he said, soft and innocent. the way that he’d learned sunggyu responded most to. sunggyu scowled. </p><p>“don’t ask me questions like that.” </p><p>“who do you trust then?” dongwoo said, because hotels were white and empty and cold and dongwoo wanted to fill the spaces between them with something other than dismissal. </p><p>“i like you, dongwoo-yah,” sunggyu said, after a long silence where the only thing dongwoo could hear was the muffled voices of passerby outside the door. “and because i like you and because i was once where you are, i’ll remind you not to trust me.” </p><p>“did he betray you then?” but he thought he knew the answer already, even if the image of a younger, more vulnerable sunggyu made something inside him ache. </p><p>“no. i made sure to shoot first.” sunggyu paused, and dongwoo breathed. “are you armed?” </p><p>“yes.” dongwoo slept with a gun under his pillow every night out of his own bed and even for a handful of the ones he did spend at home. it was a way of feeling safe enough to dream, that extra lump digging into his head. by now, he barely even registered it was there. </p><p>sunggyu smiled indulgently. “good. that’s very good.” </p><p>he patted dongwoo’s head, and the sound of the balcony’s door sliding open seemed like an avoidance, rather than a dismissal. the conversation had run its course past something sunggyu had never seemed comfortable discussing. dongwoo clutched the revolver in his pocket and understood. </p><p> </p><p>(dongwoo met sunggyu like this: </p><p>sometime in late september, when the leaves turned yellow and red and fell down, down, down, he bumped into someone on the sidewalk. </p><p>“sorry,” he said, and that someone turned around. </p><p>“well, aren’t you going to say sorry too?” he said, tilting his head. it was expected that such a gesture be reciprocated, after all. </p><p>“huh,” the man he had run into said. “i’m sorry i was present for you to run into.”</p><p>dongwoo laughed, even when he knew that there wasn’t a joke. it had always been one of his greatest strengths. “okay, thank you,” he said.</p><p>sunggyu taught him about looking and seeing, which types of men were more likely to have valuable information, guided his arm and pointed him in the right directions. he was good at it--that was the start of it all. it came so naturally to him that sunggyu would often pat his head and praise him. when sunggyu smiled at him, it was like passing under a rooftop in the middle of a storm--that brief bit of respite in the middle of a sea of chaos. dongwoo would never admit wanting that approval as desperately as he did now out loud. </p><p>sunggyu himself was good at fitting in, adapting his mannerisms to live and work in the environments he chose to do. it was not tolerance--dongwoo noticed that very quickly, because sunggyu could never quite keep the disdain off his face when he spoke of certain types--but more of an ability to pretend. make believe a genuine disinterest in a personal ideology or agenda until anyone could believe you were on their side. </p><p>“you’re a terrible liar,” sunggyu told him their second meeting. “but we can still work with that.”) </p><p> </p><p>3.<br/>
“get the door,” sunggyu hissed at him. “they called the police.”</p><p>dongwoo’s fingers trembled over the trigger of his revolver, as he unlatched the back door. “hyung-nim, your hand is bleeding.”</p><p>sunggyu glanced down and swore softly. his right hand, a scarlet mess, shook as it clutched tight and slippery around a gun. they moved out the door. heard police sirens loud enough in the distance. </p><p>“not life-threatening?” he said. he switched the gun to his left, an awkward, unwieldy grip, more for show and the comfort of the illusion of defense than anything else, dongwoo suspected. </p><p>“shouldn’t be. how much does it hurt?”  </p><p>things had been wrong, he realized now, the moment they’d walked into the building. sunggyu wove his way through corporate executives and overly cautious drug lords without any need to tell anyone, but suspicion had leeched into every rigid line of his body that dongwoo read. it seemed almost underwhelming that whoever had agreed to meet them there had instead chosen not to show. </p><p>“like fuck. i’ve had worse.”</p><p>“i didn’t know hyung-nim had a particular propensity for being shot.” </p><p>“i don’t exactly make it a priority to get shot regularly,” sunggyu ground out. and dongwoo might never have been anything close to a real doctor, but he remembered textbook anatomical diagrams and the clusters of nerves in the human hand. the focal point of contact with the rest of the world. in hindsight, it seemed like a silly question to ask how much it hurt. </p><p>“call howon,” sunggyu said. “tell him i’ll pay him extra not to dally around with the rest of the kids like he usually does.”</p><p>---<br/>
“what was he like?” said dongwoo, as he bandaged up sunggyu’s hand in the back of howon’s old honda. “the man who brought you into all this.” he made a gesture, less at howon in the driver’s seat and more at the blood splattered across the crispness of sunggyu’s shirt. </p><p>“huh,” said sunggyu. he fiddled with the empty gun in his other hand and winced only slightly when dongwoo pulled the bandages tight around the wound. “he was a criminal. an opportunist of the highest degree. he knew the right people and bribed the others.” </p><p>“that’s not what he was like.” </p><p>“i put a bullet clean through his skull,” sunggyu said sharply, yanking his patched hand away with another poorly concealed wince. “he bled out on the bathroom floor of some third rate bar, and it took them barely an hour to scrub the blood clean from the tile. none of his immediate family were alive enough to mourn him.” </p><p>“how sad.” and it was. dongwoo wondered if sunggyu had thought the same, when he’d done it. </p><p>“there were ten others lined up to do what he’d done and better.” </p><p>“that doesn’t mean death shouldn’t be something we don’t mourn.” </p><p>“a loss of human resources, emotional connection. there will always be someone else.” </p><p>dongwoo glanced sideways at sunggyu’s hands again. unexpectedly soft, smooth, that of a college student’s, rather than a fledgling crime boss. the hands that had shielded him, if only for a second, and hands that had taken lives away just as easily. </p><p>“hyung-nim--”</p><p>“<i>hyung</i>,” sunggyu interrupted impatiently. </p><p>“hyung. you should get that checked,” he said. sunggyu glanced absently at him, and for a moment all the sharpness of his face seemed to evaporate into the steady strains of howon’s hip-hop radio. “i never actually finished med school.” </p><p>sunggyu snorted at the same time howon did, a quick sort of sound that dispersed the inquietude of the car into something more comforting, more like home. </p><p>“i have no doubt you would’ve made a wonderful doctor, dongwoo-yah.” </p><p> </p><p>(“what are you doing?” woohyun had asked him early on, behind closed doors. woohyun looked red-eyed and exhausted, and dongwoo wondered how late he had been out working last night. </p><p>“what do you mean?” he said, even though he was beginning to feel that he had some idea of what this was about. </p><p>“you and sunggyu,” woohyun hissed. there was something awful about the way he said sunggyu’s name, and the desire that so quickly bubbled up to defend the perceived slight of sunggyu’s name made even dongwoo a little afraid. </p><p>“like it or not, we’ve thrown our lot in with his,” dongwoo said, sounding cloyingly defensive even to his own ears. “and we’re well--we’re friends. isn’t that enough?” </p><p>“hyung, i love you, but even you have to realize that no matter how well he helps cover your bills or how many nice places he takes you out to, he’s not your friend. he can laugh with us and play at being normal, but men like him don’t have friends. they have allies. puppets. enemies. you <i>know</i> this.”</p><p>“woohyun,” he said, “let’s not--there’s no need to go into this here.” woohyun sounded a little too much like the voice of doubt in the back of his head, the one that whispered cold scraps of observations into the back of his ear, the one that said <i>you’re wasting your time</i> and <i>why do you even bother</i>. because there was a truth here, buried well. the truth was that dongwoo had never been one to let well enough go when he felt that he could still fix a situation. </p><p>“no,” woohyun said. “tell me, what the fuck makes you think he won’t turn his back on us tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a month from now? what the fuck is it?”</p><p>dongwoo did not know how to to explain the nature of it, how to articulate it, the kind of irrationality that burned under his skin. “devotion,” he said at last, shrugging helplessly. </p><p>it was too strong of a word--too clear of a definition. the lines that still existed blurred too closely into his mind, and dongwoo had never been particularly adept and drawing those lines for himself. but it seemed enough for woohyun. </p><p>“i worry about you.” woohyun sighed, and the challenge seemed to sag out of his frame. “but i suppose i could never fault you for dishonesty.”) </p><p> </p><p>4.<br/>
“dongwoo-yah.” </p><p>“hyung.” </p><p>sunggyu folded his hands and appraised him with half an eye. he could not tell what for. “how have you been?”</p><p>“fine.” </p><p>“have you been happy?” </p><p>“yes.”</p><p>“i will not punish you for saying no.” </p><p>“i am not unhappy,” dongwoo said. it seemed foolish to compare happiness without a point of comparison, after all. but he knew that was not what sunggyu wanted to know. </p><p>something in sunggyu’s eyes shifted, something that seemed a little like sympathy. “is everything alright?”</p><p><i>i think i might be a little in love with the way you laugh.</i> “yes, of course.” </p><p>“good.” dongwoo watched sunggyu quietly ink his signature on the paper in his hands. noted the way the pen trembled involuntarily in his hand. </p><p>“hyung--your hand,” he said, before he could fully stop himself. </p><p>“what about it?”</p><p>“it still hurts, doesn’t it? you should’ve gotten it checked. it could’ve gotten infected.” </p><p>“come here then,” sunggyu sighed, outstretching his injured hand. unwittingly, dongwoo moved forward. limbs like quick stumbling blocks. sunggyu ducked under his desk for a moment, producing a roll of bandages quietly. “i’ve been changing them myself. it didn’t seem necessary to go to the trouble of finding a physician who would stay quiet.”</p><p><i>you could’ve asked me</i>, dongwoo did not say. he unwrapped the bindings around the wound, doing his best to focus on his task rather than the feeling of sunggyu’s skin against his. </p><p>“good news, hyung,” he said, probing. “it doesn’t look like you’re at severe risk of dying.” sunggyu laughed softly. </p><p>“always a good thing to hear.”</p><p>sunggyu watched him intently as dongwoo redressed the healing wound, with a look that he did not know quite how to classify. </p><p>“your happiness is not an absolute expectation,” he said suddenly. “but it is a very large positive. loyalty like yours is hard to come by these days.”</p><p>“i’m sure there are others--” there were always others. he glanced down to find that he was still clinging to sunggyu’s hand and hastily let go.  </p><p>“there was never anybody else,” sunggyu said quietly. his hands fiddled with the folds of his jacket, but when dongwoo looked up every line of his face seemed genuine. he wondered, suddenly, if sunggyu had always been this easy to read, this transparent, or if it was just dongwoo who had gotten better at recognizing the signs. gotten too used to looking and hoping. “there has never been anybody else, not really, anyway.” </p><p>“i don’t--hyung--.” he wondered what he sounded like. if he was all there, and surely this wasn’t <i>fair</i>. “i don’t think i understand.” </p><p>a trace of a half-light smirk. “don’t you?” and suddenly dongwoo didn’t have time to think, not really, because sunggyu’s uninjured hand was on his chin and he was kissing him, not the kind of kisses dongwoo lived through in hazily rendered dreams, harsh and demanding, but soft. almost considerate, in ways that dongwoo had never really imagined sunggyu to be. </p><p>so dongwoo kissed him back as fiercely as he did in those dreams, because if this was going to be a one-time thing it had to count for <i>something</i> right. </p><p>sunggyu’s hand moved, twitched somewhere against the curve of his throat, and dongwoo couldn’t help the shiver that slid its way down his spine. he thought about what those fingers could do, twist and strangle and kill. thought about whether sunggyu had ever done that before. it was the startling possessiveness of the gesture--baring his throat, putting his life in sunggyu’s hands--that hit him first, though. the thing that made something in him that wasn’t quite ready for all of this to quail. </p><p>“you think too much about things you shouldn’t worry over,” sunggyu murmured against his mouth. “just focus for a moment, alright?” </p><p>“hyung,” he began, and found that he had nothing more left to say. </p><p> </p><p>(maybe jang dongwoo falling in love with kim sunggyu was predestination, like bumping into strangers in the middle of autumn and making them laugh and thinking suddenly that you wanted to make them laugh again <strike>and again, and again.</strike></p><p>dongwoo loved as easily as he breathed, so much so it was a subconscious reaction, like sticking your hands into your pockets to make sure your house keys were there everyday. loving meant a sense of purpose, and most of all dongwoo thrived off of that, clung to it.) </p><p> </p><p>5.<br/>
the thing between him and sunggyu grew in and out of outbursts, quiet hotel room conversations and quick gunpoint shouts--something largely unspoken. after all, this was sunggyu, and dongwoo had known long, long before this that emotional work was not his particular forte. so instead they waxed and waned. dongwoo learned all of sunggyu’s moods so well he dreamed of them, when he wanted to be appeased and when he simply wanted to be left alone, and in turn sunggyu took it upon himself to be easy and indulgent, in the small, meaningful gestures. dongwoo craved human contact more than anything else, gorged himself on it until his blood swelled from the pressure, and for all his faults sunggyu seemed to understand that instinctively. </p><p>they were a cyclic duality of contrasts, the two of them. sometimes the irony of it all cut deep and sharp into dongwoo’s head, until it sent his head reeling far into uncharted territory. he caught sunggyu on late nights out, watched him move people and assets with cheap pens that bled ink all over his fingers, took him out to dinner and watched the same fingers move over glasses of high-end wine with the same sort of enchantment. sunggyu had beautiful fingers. killer’s fingers. lover’s fingers. </p><p> (“it’s the danger of it all,” a voice that sounded too much like woohyun’s would say, but dongwoo hushed it quietly and without fanfare each time. on those days it was hard to tell where the sunggyu of his mind—the idea of sunggyu he had painstakingly crafted through casual gestures and offhand comments—ended and the sunggyu who sat in hardwood chairs and signed off hit orders began.) </p><p>“not here,” sunggyu said often, while slapping his wandering hands away. <i>not here</i> was one of sunggyu’s favorite turns of phrase.  </p><p><i>not here</i> meant wrapping himself around sunggyu in old hotel rooms, sneaking around woohyun and the others even though all of them had long since known. “you did good today,” sunggyu whispered sometimes when he thought dongwoo had gone to sleep. the fingers in dongwoo’s hair still electrifyingly warm.</p><p>“have i ever disappointed?” he whispered back, somewhere against the spot where sunggyu’s shoulders flared out from the back of his neck. there was always the urge to giggle, like they were storybook schoolgirls, huddling under the covers and plotting out the rest of their sleepover days of making friendship bracelets and glitter hearts. </p><p>“don’t be ridiculous,” sunggyu would say, when he would say anything at all. </p><p>(“no,” he said sometimes too. “now go to sleep.”)</p><p>“of course not, hyung,” he would say, laughing quietly in the darkness as sunggyu grumbled through the veneer of quiet-exhaustion. sunggyu was softer than he had any right to be, in more ways than one, but dongwoo cherished sunggyu shaking him roughly awake every morning just as much as stolen elevator kisses. </p><p> </p><p>(dongwoo could’ve found it in himself to love nearly anyone he came across. </p><p>dongwoo woke up one november morning and sunggyu was still there in his head, littered across the insides of his skull in a trail of cold, damning evidence.) </p><p> </p><p>6.<br/>
“i think i might love you,” dongwoo said one day, flipping idly through the papers on sunggyu’s desk. sunggyu looked out over the shutters of his window-empire and sighed. </p><p>“you shouldn’t say that.” </p><p>he laughed. “well, i’ve said it then. you’ll have to kill me now.” sunggyu started, like he was about to reproach him, but stilled against his wall again. </p><p>“i always considered you an intelligent man.” it felt like another dismissal, but sunggyu was watching him, and it was those dark eyes that egged him on. </p><p>dongwoo would have written all the scribbling, half-incoherent confessions in the world if it meant that sunggyu would respond in kind. he supposed that was as good as love. “there are different ways to measure intelligence,” he said instead. “and maybe that means i might actually be in love with you.”</p><p>“i’ve never trusted anyone quite like i do you,” sunggyu said slowly, parsing out every syllable. and then, “i cannot give you anything that someone like you would want.” </p><p>“hyung,” he said. the sense of relief felt too numbing to stand on. “isn’t it obvious by now? i don’t need anything else.” </p><p>sunggyu huffed. he reached out and grabbed dongwoo’s hand, outstretched on instinct. like gravity. a force of nature. “don’t use that word again,”</p><p>“which word?” an incredulous laugh, because sometimes sunggyu’s mercurial behavior could cross the line into ridiculous so, so easily, even for him. “<i>love</i>?”</p><p>the lines of sunggyu’s eyebrows pressed deep, thin lines into his face as he scowled. “love is what they use in novels and dramas when they want to appeal to the unhappy masses, dongwoo-yah. dreams are beautiful, but only when you’re asleep.”</p><p>“maybe i’m already awake.” dongwoo smiled, thumbed across the long white scar that sliced viciously through sunggyu’s hand. “or maybe i’m merely happy dreaming. does it really matter, hyung?” a sharp noise crawled out of the back of sunggyu’s throat, some strange mixture of derision and disbelief. </p><p>“what silly creatures we are,” sunggyu said, as he shoved dongwoo lightly off his desk and gathered his papers. in the dimness of the room, it seemed almost like he was crying. </p><p> </p><p>(once upon a time, before kim sunggyu made a name for himself on the streets with jang dongwoo and five other boys behind him, woohyun and dongwoo used to laugh and skip stones together. they laughed and ran, and pretended to be green-light kids again, chasing the birds scattered across the banks of the pond with the carelessness of adolescents. in those moments it felt like dongwoo had known and loved woohyun for a lifetime over. they lived and breathed the same air as each other in perfect sync, and that was enough. </p><p>“aren’t birds such fearless little things?” woohyun said once. the late afternoon sun was beginning to fade into the distance, but neither of them had thought to go home yet. “they’re not afraid of us. not of people, at least. ”</p><p>they were small creatures, indeed, slender, narrowed beaks and sharp little claws that communed together in little cult packs. they were small, but they were not skittish, and woohyun and dongwoo would play at how close they could get to them before they would run. </p><p>“should they be?” he said. </p><p>“logically speaking, yes,” woohyun said. “we are much more dangerous than any other predator around here. it seems sad, actually, that the animals around us have been so domesticated by industry.”</p><p>they watched one skim along the water, a quick elegant dance. “they learn to adapt,” he said. “and to not be scared of the things around them that mean them no harm.”</p><p>woohyun frowned, and dongwoo could tell he was no longer thinking about birds or skipping stones. “maybe they’ve just grown so used to danger that they won’t even run until it’s too close for them to do so.”</p><p>but dongwoo looked at birds in the distance, their wings spread wide, and thought about something else. thought about the ability to go unnoticed, undeterred. flying. </p><p>“maybe,” he said. “but they’re free.”)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>there was a part 2 to this with sunggyu's pov but i got busy and lazy and never finished it </p><p>dongwoo/sunggyu is a beautiful god-tier pairing and it's honestly a travesty that there's barely any fic for it. like c'mon guys dongwoo's unconscious loyalty towards sunggyu or the way he makes him laugh so ridiculously easily? this shit just writes itself.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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